Server room example (photo cred: camknows-Flickr)
Have you ever wondered if not printing an e-mail is really saving the planet? Are the little “think before you print” messages making a dent in our efforts to go green? In my opinion, saving an e-mail in your inbox is just as harmful.
For a long time, I have been an advocate of conserving paper when possible. I try to re-use scraps if I can, and cram more than one memo on a sticky note. And then I had a flash back to the days I worked at Go Daddy and remember the massive server rooms I was required to check and log every hour. If you’ve never been in a server room, you should try to check one out sometime. They are usually massive, empty rooms with special floors and are temperature controlled. Racks and racks of servers line the aisles in special cages all connected with wires and monitors and so on… They’re usually spotless. The memory of these gigantic rooms of racks (get your mind out of the gutter) makes me wonder if printing an e-mail is really that harmful. I would love to find information about the energy consumption of a server room vs. the cost of printing an e-mail. Is it really worth it to save your e-mail in a file? I can’t imagine it would be since we’re looking at the costs of all the server components to build and maintain, the labor required to ensure 24-hour operation and the production of things needed to run them.
So, next time you see an e-mail that says “think before you print” spend some time wondering where on earth that server is located with your message and how much it’s costing someone to store it.
PS- Interesting fact found in Brian Christian’s The Most Human Human:
“the unavoidable presence of spam in the twenty-first century not only clogs the in-boxes and bandwidth of the world (roughly 97 percent of all email messages are spam—we are talking tens of billions a day; you could literally power a small nation* with the amount of electricity it takes to process the world’s daily spam), but does something arguably worse—it erodes our sense of trust.”
*Say, Ireland.
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